"No, Miss St. Just; you may set your mind at rest upon that point. I
have done quite enough harm already to your family. Now, good-bye! I
will wait for the post to-morrow: do you go to your sister."
Valencia went, utterly bewildered. She had forgotten Frank, but Frank
had not forgotten her. He had hurried to his room; lay till morning,
sleepless with delight, and pouring out his pure spirit in thanks for
this great and unexpected blessing. A new life had begun for him, even
in the jaws of death. He would still go to the East. It seemed easy to
him to go there in search of a grave; how much more now, when he felt so
full of magic life, that fever, cholera, the chances of war, could not
harm him! After this proof of God's love, how could he doubt, how fear?
Little he thought that three doors off from him, Valencia was sitting up
the whole night through, vainly trying to quiet Lucia, who refused to
undress, and paced up and down her room, hour after hour in wild misery,
which I have no skill to detail.
CHAPTER XXI.
NATURE'S MELODRAMA.
What, then, had become of Elsley? And whence had he written the fatal
letter? He had hurried up the high road for half an hour and more, till
the valley on the left sloped upward more rapidly, in dark dreary bogs,
the moonlight shining on their runnels; while the mountain on his right
sloped downwards more rapidly in dark dreary down, strewn with rocks
which stood out black against the sky. He was nearing the head of the
watershed; soon he saw slate roofs glittering in the moonlight, and
found himself at the little inn of Pen-y-gwryd, at the meeting of the
three great valleys, the central heart of the mountains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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